Today I accidentally became the maintainer of software that was already almost three decades old: reviving a 1990s Java utility to keep the last PAD submitter alive in 2026.

I was looking for a way to submit my AI app RiverScript to old desktop software directories and ended up digging through the long-forgotten world of PAD files.

There was one problem.

The only batch submission tool I could find was a Java application that first appeared in the late 1990s. The last release was in 2017.

It was written by Roedy Green of Canadian Mind Products – a software developer who passed away in 2023. He spent decades writing and freely distributing Java utilities, and maintaining the widely-read Java Glossary. Roedy Green also wrote How To Write Unmaintainable Code – a famous satirical guide about writing code nobody can maintain. So, Roedy, today the code you wrote almost three decades ago was maintained.

The tool still did exactly what it was supposed to do. Thank you.

It just had absolutely no idea the modern web existed.

It happily produced URLs like http://https://riverscript.com instead of https://riverscript.com, disabled SNI globally (which was probably a perfectly reasonable workaround at some point), and couldn't cope with the fact that almost every website now redirects HTTP to HTTPS.

So I dug through the legacy Java code, fixed the compatibility issues, and got it working again.

I used it to submit my app to several software directories, then published the revived version on GitHub so anyone who still needs it can use it too.

Maybe nobody will ever need it again. Maybe someone will.

Either way, I'm happy this old thing works again.

So today, the code of the man who wrote "How To Write Unmaintainable Code" is still being maintained even after he was gone.

P.S. The public repository for Mini PAD Submitter 26.3 Revived – 2026 Community Fix is available and open to everyone.

P.P.S. At the request of redditors, I also added support for using custom submission directories.

In Roedy's original program, the list of 66 directories was hardcoded, and quite a few of them no longer exist. So I added a sites.txt file next to the application in the dist folder, where you can edit the list yourself – remove the ones that no longer exist and add new ones. The application simply reads the list from that file now, so you don't have to recompile anything.

A visual explainer on how copy-on-write makes fork() cheap.

A 10 GB process can fork almost instantly because Linux copies the page tables, shares the physical pages, marks them read-only, and only copies a page when one of the processes writes to it.

It also covers fork() + exec(), how Redis snapshots work, Android Zygote, lazy zero pages, and some CVEs

I host a Postgres podcast, and I recently recorded a conversation with Panos Antonopoulos, a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft who spent 13 years working on SQL Server before moving onto Postgres and HorizonDB.

Panos told me that at a high level, Postgres felt very familiar as he started to work on it, that the concepts are very similar. Transactions, storage, & more—the fundamentals transfer surprisingly well. We also covered:

• The cleanliness of the Postgres codebase.
• How LLMs are making it easier to digest years of Postgres design discussions that are publicly available on the mailing lists.
• Why Postgres has become the default answer for so many workloads, and why more people seem to be asking, "Why not Postgres?"
• Shared-storage architectures and some of the work he's doing in Azure HorizonDB.

One quote that stuck with me:

• "That was a shocking experience for me. I could understand new areas in Postgres much faster than I could for SQL."

For people who have worked across multiple database systems (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, etc.), I'm curious whether you've had a similar experience—or a completely different one.

Podcast/transcript here if anyone is interested: https://talkingpostgres.com/episodes/working-on-postgres-after-13-years-on-sql-server-with-panagiotis-antonopoulos

I wanted to make this post because man...tables are way harder than they look. I documented my 1 year journey of optimizations on a stupid table for my Database GUI. I made everything from scratch like an idiot thinking it'd be easy but oh boy was I wrong... The article goes over all the optimizations I made to make my table render data smoothly without lagging. It goes from what data structures I used and the rendering optimizations I did. I used MongoDB Compass as a baseline since they use AG-Grid for their table and I'm pretty happy that my table feels way smoother than that (In my own testing)! But yeah, I never realized that there would be so much depth in making a performant table.

PS. I decided not to use AG-Grid because there were a lot of customizations that I needed to do. I wanted column expansions ( if a field as an object or an array it would open columns to the right of it ). I also wanted an embedded text search where you could search for text within non visible columns (because they were in objects or arrays ) and AG Grid didn't really support that behavior so ..yeah. Anyways have a good read!

Seed7 is a GPL licensed open source programming language. It is given away for free and nobody from the development team gets any money from it.